Marcel Proust

The New York Times Photo Archive

News about Marcel Proust, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.

Chronology of Coverage

Nov. 8, 2013

Centennial of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, first installment of his book In Search of Lost Time, is being remembered through various events around New York City; celebration represents chance for the rarefied Proust to grab some pop-culture market share in United States. MORE

Feb. 15, 2013

Edward Rothstein reviews Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, exhibition celebrating the centennial of the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past at the Morgan Library & Museum. MORE

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Highlights From the Archives

In the 81 years since Marcel Proust's death, ''In Search of Lost Time'' has come to seem ever more indispensable. It's remarkable that this 3,000-page novel, initially dismissed by many as the work of a self-indulgent neurotic dilettante, has become the crucial modernist work, overtopping the books of even such giants as Joyce and Mann.

In the case of Marcel Proust, there was a ludicrous gap between his life and art. A sycophantic snob and posturing dandy, he frittered away his youth -- and his father's money -- trying to ingratiate himself with the idle rich; in his masterpiece, ''Remembrance of Things Past,'' he would transform those frivolous experiences into a luminous meditation on the nature of time and memory and loss.

The Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz has approached that literary Godzilla, Marcel Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past,'' from the most challenging vantage point possible. It is Mr. Ruiz's aspiration to synthesize the themes and characters of Proust's monumental work in a single film. In the face of such a daunting prospect, a running time of 158 minutes is really no time at all.

What is it about Proust that makes him of such enduring interest? ''Like Proust, we are going through a fin de siecle,'' said William Carter, one of his biographers. ''In the novel he really traces the effects of modern inventions, machines of mass transit, on our perceptions of time and space.''

Memory -- summoned, enhanced and preserved through his remarkable gift of language -- became the means by which Proust transformed his short life, and gave the depressing shards of his daily existence the permanence and redemptive beauty of art.

February 15, 2013, Friday

Lovers of Proust, get out your headphones: Naxos AudioBooks, a British division of the classical music label, has recorded all seven volumes of "Remembrance of Things Past" on CD - 120 discs, which will take 153 hours to get through. The last one...